New goals, and finding ways of meeting them

Shot 3-5 is done and dusted.


Alright, here's the game plan.

This is a 7 minute film, of which 97 seconds is animated. I started animating in October, so it's been almost 2 months.

I can do about a minute a month, maybe more... So that's 15 seconds a week.

Yesterday, working 24 hours straight, I got 16 seconds done. Today I'm working from 7am until 2pm, so that's 7 hours of shoot time.

Originally, the plan was to do 1 scene per month, but some are longer than others (9 is really long). Instead, 20 to 30 seconds per week is what's on order.

Post is a different story... I feel like airbrushing the heck out of everything and making it look perfect, because the sculpting job on this is really bad. At the very least, future shots are going to have more of a polish. I'm upgrading my framegrabber, so I'll be able to see all the fine mistakes I've been missing during animation.

There is a new weirdness that I want to point out:

Black dots appear in only one frame of a sequence. I don't know what caused this, but as you can see, they're in a straight line.

Has anyone else had this issue with a DSLR?



Meanwhile, I've figured out the alien lip sync! It's going to be done really simply- a knife is used to cut off the entire mouth area, so it's flat. That gets patted down with a finger, then the teeth are added. After that, two large flaps that make up the lips are pressed on around the teeth. Now we have a mouth. The inside is digitally airbrushed black, and the seams of the mouth are blurred out. If you use JPEG's, the blur tool will work better because of the small compression artifacts. I just bought Photo Brush 5, as this is the BEST software I've ever used for photo retouching. It includes motion blur as well. I long forgot about this software until a girl I used to date mentioned the stuff I used to make with it. I went to download it, and lo, there's a new version! This is going to help so, so much with post production. Just speed it right along.

The result of the blurring looks like a jaw bone moving under the skin. I'm going to be doing some lip sync with the aliens in the next scene, so that's why I've held off on those tests. It will be worth the wait, though. Those guys are going to SPARKLE!

Now, these aliens have a comical way of talking. Their lower jaw can move upwards. I thought that would be a fun touch. Here's a large version of my current StopMotionanimation.com avatar.

Hey folks,

A handful of updates in the ol' workflow;

1. I figured out how to export video from my framegrabber in the aspect ratio I'm editing in. That makes me very happy.

2. The resolution of live feed just got better.

3. Frames can be exported right from the program (although I'm still not sure how to do that with my current version of Vegas Movie Studio.

4. Did some masking to replace the blue blanket background. Now it's a glowing, moving sky!

Also animated shot 3-3 and 3-4 today, it looks rad.

This film is happenin', dudes!

2319 frames shot, 8471 more to go. I'm trying for 2 scenes per month. Some of them are shorter, so they go quick.

Blue Alien TRAILER!

Looks like Youtube HD is pretty sweet after all. I like that you can watch stuff in that mode with the window staying the same size. This is something Youtube picked up from Vimeo, it looks like.

Alright, just have to finish backing up everything so far, and then it's on with Scene 3!

Apology

I'm sorry, everyone. This film, and my job, and my living situation are stressing me out and making me crazy. I hope I didn't lose friends over this or shove a steak knife through the heart of my animating career.

This is the biggest project I've ever taken on, and I would equate it to that 80's game, Operation. One wrong move, and I have to fix a lot of things because I'm editing as I go. That's just my style of working, I like to see a finished project coming together one shot at a time instead of doing a lot of corrective post at the end. Things came to a head last week when I changed everything to 720p high definition. Not realizing I was working from backup, I edited an older project than the most current one, saving only standard definition video clips as upscaled high def ones. This very easy to do when you're horrendously disorganized. As a result, bits and chunks of shots I need are scattered everywhere over 3 drives (sound familiar?) I don't know how this keeps happening, but I do feel like I'm getting dumber as I get older, and pretty soon I'll need someone to dress me. :P

There is no way I'm giving up, though. No matter how many setbacks or inconveniences or bag-over-the-head surprises there will be, I will stubbornly keep going. You should see my box of Perserverence trophies... Stick-to-itivness is nothing new with me; I lack the common sense or decency to toss in the towel. At age 8 I swam 100 laps after pledging to do 20. Two years later, I fought in a Tae Kwon Do elimination tournament for 2 1/2 hours. You might see me say something COMPLETELY STUPID, or accidentally inconvenience someone because I'm an occasional low-blood-sugar-fueled doofus, and I might screw up now and then just because I don't know all the rules of the game, but you will NEVER...ever see me quit anything I set out to do. I've reached every goal I've ever set for myself (Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do, Graduate High School, move to Portland, make popular music and animation on Youtube...) and this is another one I intend to accomplish. Thank you for being patient with me, those of you who have stuck around.

It is strange to see that the one thing crucial to surviving in this business is the one thing I lack.

I'm going to be frank, because I'm not feeling well...

If I can't get a reasonable facsimile of this film on Youtube, I'm *not* going to upload Blue Alien Summer there. Instead, I will be shopping around for the best NON-Flash website to host it; I may even build my own site, just for the movie. It's kind of ridiculous that it's so difficult to get video to look good on the internet; I thought we were over that hump 10 years ago with Quicktime, Real Video, and Windows Media.

Technology is great!

I bought a WONDIFEROUS new camera yesterday, the Kodak Zi6. Using it for reference footage, it can shoot in low light at 15fps, normal light at 30fps, and outdoors at 60fps- all progressive formats!

A couple of features I llllloooove about this camera is the ability to shoot stop motion tests with it, because it interfaces with framegrabbing software via video out. It does this in stills mode, although it will shut itself off after a few minutes of not taking pictures. Not intended for a serious stop motion animator, and I'm probably just exploiting a feature, but it's AWESOME!

The other cool thing is that the camera can record video and then step through it frame by frame forward, in reverse, and forward in many versions of slow-motion. So being battery operated (rechargeables), you can use it to shoot reference footage for animation anywhere- go outside and bounce a basketball, record that, play it back frame by frame... I'm not about to give up working at 24fps for this (especially since the clips can be dragged into my editing programs and framegrabber and converted down), but I might shoot some scenes at 15fps, which would make the video reference directly compatible. The camera moves would be added in post at 24. Today I'm going to take it in and try to exchange it for the next model up, which has an IR remote and a couple of other goodies, but this little camera is a great find, and you can use it to study all types of motion which can only make you a better animator.